45. Spur of the Moment Beach Day

Wednesday 9/22- Ever since the day we went on our adventure to the deserted beach it’s been on our mind to go back. This morning we started with our regular routine of coffee and our walk, and as we were cooling down after our run up the hill we decided that since it was a beautiful day and we didn’t have any plans until 2:00 (I had a work call) that we would go spend a few hours at the beach. We decided that this time, though, we wouldn’t bring Breeze with us. Even though we think she really likes playing out there, a beach adventure for her means a bath for her-- and those just aren’t easy to do here and we all know how much she likes them! (We don't particularly care for giving them either!)

Journée GIFfrom Dog GIFs

Plus, we really wanted to walk farther down the beach this time and didn’t want to worry about her overheating or not having to carry extra water for her to drink. I justified not bringing her with me by the fact that she doesn’t know that we’re going to the beach and that she’s missing out on a fun time!

So Ramie and I packed a light lunch, some snacks, and a couple of bottles of water (unfortunately we didn’t have any easily portable adult beverages to bring with) and hopped in the car for another adventure down that crazy road. Earlier this week we had received quite a bit of rain and we heard that the road was almost completely under water but still passable, so we were curious to see what it would be like today when we got there!

Well, luckily for me (and much to Ramie’s disappointment) the water had mostly drained away by the time we got there today, and there were actually fewer deep puddles than there were the last time we were there! That’s completely ok, though, and didn’t detract at all from our beach adventure. We went all the way to the end by the impassable bridge again and found a big mud hole for Ramie to drive the truck though. He was pretty proud of himself backing right through the pit and sinking the drivers side up to the running boards. Fortunately he was able to get out of his mud pit without any trouble! After we parked we decided to go walk up and down the beach. Today we just walked and walked again, farther this time than we did last time since we didn’t have Breeze with us, and still not a single person in sight. After we had walked about a half hour in one direction we decided to turn around and go back the other direction. When we made it back to where we started, we just kept going for a while again. Once again today there were no shells on the beach, but there were sections where there were large piles of small rocks. When we got to these areas of rocks we slowed down and looked for any that caught our eye or looked cool. We were also hoping to find a shark tooth or something cool like that! We did find a really neat piece of dead coral and some cool stones, along with a couple more pieces of driftwood. We even found something that may be petrified wood (I don’t know what would have scared it so badly hahahah)! 

The coolest rock we found

Our heart shaped rocks and some others we found interesting.

 

After we had our fill of rocks and walking, we made our way back to where the car was parked, found a shady spot, and laid out our beach blanket and grabbed the cooler. 

Truly a tropical beach!

The small river flowing into the ocean

 

Up until this point we still hadn’t seen anyone anywhere out here. Shortly after we sat down another couple pulled up and started walking down the beach just like we did when we got there. They walked for quite a while before we saw them come back. They then did the same as we did, pulled out a cooler, a couple of chairs, and an umbrella (their beach setup is far more advanced than ours) and set up their little area to relax. This beach is definitely big enough for us to share, and since we were off to the back near the trees, we almost couldn’t even see them from where we sat. We spent an hour or so just lounging around, watching and listening to the waves and relaxing. After spending a few hours out at the beach today, we had to pack it up and go home so I could do a little bit of work this afternoon. Here is a short video of the road out of the beach area.

 

 

I would have to say that even though our very nice day out at the beach wasn’t really adventurous, it is definitely not something we would have ever done back in MN. I was never really a spur of the moment type person, an outing like this would have had to be planned a week in advance. It’s kind of nice to just decide to get up and go do something fun once in a while! I could see us making little outings like this more often!



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Saturday 9/25- Ok, yeah-- we’ve been kind of boring lately. At this point we aren’t really doing a whole lot of anything, there hasn’t been any new developments on the house, and there is not a whole lot to report. Earlier this week we asked Geiner if he could fit us into his grounds maintenance schedule and have his guys go out to cut our property. The grass/weeds were getting pretty tall in some areas and we thought it would be best to keep it under control to keep critters out of the area. We also learned that many people’s yards are just the natural grasses and plants that grow here instead of planted grass seed like we use back in MN. I guess if you keep the height under control and keep it cut every few weeks it will learn to spread and grow short and thick as opposed to the knee-high grass that we were getting out there now. Geiner had let us know yesterday that his guys had been out there so we wanted to go check it out. A side note about yard maintenance. “Mowing” here isn’t like you’d think of in MN. In MN you mow using a lawn mower- either a push mower or a riding lawn mower. In Costa Rica, you don’t really see lawn mowers, either riding or push! Here, they use weed whackers for their yards. Even if you have a large yard, and even the landscaping companies do 99% of all of the mowing around here with a weed whacker. Unless you have a REALLY big and FLAT yard, there is not a very good chance that you will ever have an actual lawn mower. So, we went to our property first and it looked really good with the tall weeds all cut down. We were once again able to walk around and get a look at the lot and make some estimates of where the house would lay out, how far back or forward on the property we wanted to build, and just walk around without worrying about critters in the tall weeds. After we had spent a little bit of time at our lots, since we were in town, we had a few other errands to run and decided to make the most of our trip down the hill (not that it was far or anything like that, we’re just boring and don’t come down off of our hill a lot!)

A month or so ago when we brought Breeze swimming and stopped at the river we saw some people down there gathering river rocks and loading them into their vehicle. An entire pick up truck bed full of smooth river rocks. Up at our rental house there were a few places that could use some edging to keep Breeze out of the flowers, so we decided to go down to the river to get some rocks. 

This spot on the river is kind of neat, there is a steep, narrow driveway from the road to the edge of the river and then it opens up to a beach of smooth rocks that are about the size of softballs to volleyballs. This area is pretty wide before it drops off and the river gets deep enough to actually flow. The river isn’t especially deep here either, as we have seen people ride horses across the river. So, we backed the truck right out to the edge of the rocks, collected a couple dozen nice sized edging rocks and were happy that we could make a small update to our rental yard without spending any money to do it.

 

After our little outing at the river, of course we had to stop down at the mini-golf to see how their first week turned out. Unfortunately it had been pretty slow all week. Ramie and I chatted with Loren for a little while, and then Ramie went up to the office to talk to Geiner about some house things. While Ramie was with Geiner, I stayed and talked to Loren about how to increase business for the mini-golf. We talked about advertising ideas, social media, and I mentioned a handful of ways he could really get his presence known. Geiner has been too busy with his construction business to really focus on the Facebook stuff and Loren doesn’t do Facebook at all, so I volunteered to help out with it for now. Ramie and I are pretty computer savvy. It probably wouldn’t take real long to update the mini-golf Facebook page, add some nice pictures, and make some informational graphics to post. He really appreciated that we were willing to help out with this, and I think Geiner appreciated us taking this off of his plate too!

Ramie was talking to Geiner for longer than I expected so I ended up going to see what they were talking about without me. We found out that he’s almost finished writing up our quote and contract and will have that ready to send to us soon. Ramie talked to him about a few other ideas that he had for house related things, such as installing a solar water heater instead of the typical electric on-demand one (like the one we had troubles with a few months ago) and what type of insulation we were going to use in the ceiling. They were just about finished talking by the time I entered the conversation, so I decided I would just have Ramie fill me in later instead of going through it all again.

That was our excitement for the day, so after that we went back up to our little house and spent the rest of the day doing our regular chores and doing the things we normally do.